This past week, I had a burger craving. I didn't want a fast food burger, and I didn't want to put up the scratch for a burger at one of the classier joints here in town, so I decided to Build-A-Burger. Kroger is just a five minute walk from our apartment, so I took a trip to pick up a few of the necessary items. I stuck to the basics: Kroger-brand hamburger buns, 73% lean ground beef, and Kraft Deluxe American singles.
I considered truly making this an experiment, grabbing what spices and ingredients I could find in our tiny kitchen and infusing it with the ground beef. I'd made Ernest Hemingway's manburger a few months back, but the recipe called for all things exotic in the land of the burger like red wine and relish. But, like all good experiments, I needed a control group first. I went completely plain.
No salt, no pepper. Nothing at all in the burger patty except the meat itself. I formed three patties out of the one pound of hamburger meat. Two I wrapped in parchment paper and placed in Ziploc bags in the freezer. The third was mine that day.
Spraying down a thin layer of canola oil on a skillet, I let it heat at medium-high. As soon as I dropped the uncooked meat onto the skillet, the sizzle let me know I was in business. Four minutes seemed an ample time to let it cook on one side. Then I remembered the inherent problem with using the skillet: the hot splash of grease that bursts forth like a small stinging fountain. Spots of sepia dotted the white surface of the stove, forming a silhouette around the pan. I cleaned as I went, unable to cover it because there was no lid for the skillet. I was focused--determined to cook a basic burger.
Four minutes up and I flipped the burger with difficulty. My spatula did not slide under the burger as easily as I had imagined it would, so it pushed it up to the edge. Pangs of panic shot through me as I dreaded pushing the half-cooked patty onto the stove, causing further mess and inconvenience. Finally, I gritted my teeth and used my free hand to negotiate the patty onto my spatula, hot needles poking at my skin.
Four more minutes. Almost home. The outside was black and brown, but mostly black from the skillet. I wondered if it wasn't as cooked as I had hoped. I wondered if I'd be missing a day or two of work because of a burger blunder. What joy.
Three minutes in and I took a slice of cheese I had at the ready and blanketed the burger's naked surface in processed yellow. Heat made the slice wrap itself tighter across the surface, almost to the point where the four corners touched the pan. By that point, the final minute passed and it was time to enjoy the product of my labors. Bun opened, I lay the burger down. Juices ran down the bottom half of the bun. The top half set itself on top like it was destined to stay there. I dug in.
The charred black from the skillet made the burger crunchy but not inedible. I saw that the burger was pink but reasonably cooked, so it was unlikely to cause me much grief in the following days. Overall, I was satisfied. I'm easy to please when it comes to my burgers. But there is more to be done in burger science, a frontier not yet fully discovered.
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